


And strong tradition that guards the gate

by nagia



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, Does Not Feature Soulbonds, F/M, You've heard of Fake Dating; now try Fake Hostage Situation!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 06:07:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12029769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: All Karen wanted was the truth.  She never meant to end up holding herself hostage in order to save the Punisher's life.





	And strong tradition that guards the gate

Dawn whereof we know not, and noon whose fruit we reap,  
Garnered up in record of years that fell like flowers,  
Sunset liker sunrise along the shining steep  
Whence thy fair face lightens, and where thy soft springs leap,  
Crown at once and gird thee with grace of guardian powers.

Loved of men beloved of us, souls that fame inspheres,  
All thine air hath music for him who dreams and hears;  
Voices mixed of multitudes, feet of friends that pace,  
Witness why for ever, if heaven's face clouds or clears,  
Dawn and noon and sunset are one before thy face.  
— A. C. Swinburne, "A Ballad of Bath," 1889

* * *

She's just gotten Grotto settled back into his hospital bed, and his expression is even still annoyed and mutinous, when she hears it. The slow march of footsteps. The noise of metal drawing slowly over metal, and then the strangely satisfying click as someone pumps a shotgun. The plasticky sound of a casing ejecting and then the clatter as it hits the floor.

"Up," she hisses at Grotto, her nerves shocky and the scent of his blood, the chemical smell of the drugs they'd been pumping him with — he's on antibiotics, she can tell from the foot-fungus-and-chemicals stench of the IV — all but overpowering her, stinging in her nose. She pulls the IV needle out of his arm with hands that shake, then slaps his other hand over the red dot of his blood on his skin.

Christ, she can smell his blood. There's something sharp and strangely thin about the smell, but now is not the time.

Karen tows him to the door and almost stops moving. Two police officers in tactical gear, with the letters ESU printed on their vests, are heading away from Grotto's door, toward the end of the hall where the screaming is coming from. She almost closes her eyes, almost sighs with relief.

But the shotgun roars twice, the sound of it echoing off the walls, and she hears the crunchy thud of somebody hitting the plaster wall, and she's pulling Grotto behind her as she makes for the emergency stairs. The metal lever is cold under her hands; pushing it in and down makes an alarm shrill, and god, she wants to slap her hands over her ears. She doesn't dare, not with whoever the hell that is chasing after her.

After them.

Grotto's breathing hard as she pulls him down after her. She can hear his footsteps and they're uneven. He's skipping stairs to keep up.

The door bangs open and she screams, unable to help it, unable to stop herself.

The shotgun roars again, and this time, the sound is so loud that she gets lost in it. In the way the sound of it firing bounces off the metal stairs and the walls and the concrete floor far below them. She hears the crunch, and the metal plink, as the bullet burrows into a wall.

And the rest of the world ceases to matter. Fuck being a transparent eyeball, she has apparently become a throbbing auditory nerve. A hollow ear canal, maybe. She can't move. She can't see. There's a moment she's not even sure she's breathing.

She's listening to the march of the combat boots as they come even closer, even as she hears Grotto's softly exhaled, "What the fuck?"

Karen can hear the drops of blood from Grotto's IV incision hit the metal stairs — one goes through one of the holes to fall all the way to the floor, plopping on the concrete — and is acutely aware of his bare toes as he shuffles toward her. There's a sense of motion in the air that her ears pick up, and soft, papery swishes as his hospital gown moves. She thinks he might be reaching for her, but she's so busy hearing everything — the people scrambling upstairs, the alarms blaring loud and soft and loud again, the sound of hands moving on a metal tube — that she can't tell.

Until Grotto says, from right next to her, "Come on, lady, we gotta go now. You can't freeze up. I don't wanna leave you here. Come on, come on, please —"

He doesn't finish that last sentence. She hears the sound of fingers on metal again, and the tiny metallic click as the trigger squeezes, and the slam of the hammer into the cartridge, and the tiny _foomph_ of the gunpowder lighting. Followed by the roar of the slug down the barrel, into the air.

There's a wet noise as the bullet hits Grotto somewhere, and for just a second, she smells blood and something briny and something meaty, and then the smell is gone as pieces of him spatter against the wall, and his lungs wheeze uselessly —

And then his heart stutters to a stop.

And she's left there, listening, as the combat boots come closer. His heartbeat is steady. She thinks, anyway; heartbeats are all different. But his seems slow and sure. His clothes whisper to her as he moves, and even though he's obviously trying to be quiet, his footsteps ring a little against the emergency stairs. Just enough, because he's closer, to be heard over the alarm.

A whisper of something through the air, and then the sound of skin rasping against skin. The slithery click of a finger snap, repeated. And then — oh, thank god, maybe she's coming out of it — a hand against her cheek, tapping at her cheekbone. Her skin must be hyper-sensitized to him; it's taking careful note of every callus and rough patch. And her ears drink in the slapping noise as he taps his palm on her face.

"Shit, this a zone out?" He says, and his voice is so richly textured and she'd swear she's getting every single nook and cranny in the sound, every note of every syllable, every rumble of breath. "You don't look like a sentinel. Hey, can you hear me?"

She doesn't know if she moves her eyes. She's totally blind, or might as well be. But oh, god, yes, she can hear him. She can't seem to respond, though, and he just says, softly, "Fuck. Actual zone out." He mumbles something under his breath, but even with her hearing, she can't turn it into words. It resolves into something soft and slurred, something she thinks might be, "Safe enough here," and then he's moving on past her, the air eddying in currents around him, and his boots a ringing echo on the stairs that bounces off the walls, on and on, into forever.

And Karen can do nothing but listen.

* * *

_He won't stop coming toward her. She's been yelling at him to keep back, to stay away from her, and there's blood seeping down her face and stinging her eye, but he doesn't stop —_

_The gun kicks in her hands, once and twice and again, and again, and a seventh time, and then it's rasping empty. The gunshots won't stop echoing through the woods, bouncing off the trees and ringing out into the darkness, and the hollow clicks as she pulls the useless trigger seem to take up the whole world._

_It's like her vision is gone, and all that's left is sound. The sound of his blood leaking from seven little holes that she knows are neat on one side and messy on the other. The hisses and plinks of both their cars cooling, settling, where one rests against the trunk of the tree and one rests against the other. Her own ragged breath, in and out, the hiss of steam forming in the air._

_She can hear the slow, slushy sound of snow falling._

_Karen doesn't move. Can't move. She stays where she is, listening, until the first responders arrive, and though the police think it's shock, the EMT's know better._

* * *

The hospital almost settles into a pattern. Police sweeping through it, news crews, patients being evacuated. But none of the doctors find her in the emergency stairwell. None of the EMT's. She's left alone, feeling almost like she doesn't exist. Like she's a creature made out of airwaves, hovering on the edges of them.

Something covered in cloth thuds against the fire door at the bottom of the stairs. There's a creak as it swings open again, hinges protesting, and a low, dragging squeal as it's pushed over the concrete. A pair of heavy boots — but not the man with combat boots, not the man who'd murdered Grotto — and a body that moves like it's weighed down. Swathed in cloth, and something that sounds almost plasticy. It makes the heartbeat sound dim and far away. Body armor, maybe?

A man's voice. "Oh, shit. Shit, shit." Awed, at first. Then terrified. A pause, and then, plastic rattling. The voice is muffled when it says, "Hey, need EMT's to south emergency stairwell. Morris, you should see this. Bring uh. Bring the DA, too. We got a fatality and some other — other kinda casualty."

The boots come closer. Another swish in the air. More skin sliding against skin and then a clack, all real close. Finger snaps, she recognizes. This asshole is snapping his fingers in her face.

The door opens again. More boots, and beside them, a pair of clicking heels. A woman says, "I don't see the — fuck. I thought Grote got away. You said Grote got away." There's annoyance in there. Something raspy, like she used to smoke a lot. Authority, too; this is a woman in charge who has been disappointed.

"We didn't see Grote in his hospital room or on any of the other floors, Ms. Reyes. And it's looking more like Castle followed 'em into the stairwell," says a new man's voice. It's calm and reasonable and the accent is hard to pin down. Military, she thinks, maybe.

"This was Castle's work?"

"Shotgun blast turned the side of this guy's head to —" Air moving. A gesture. "That. There was only one person firing a tactical shotgun here tonight, and he only had one target."

The first man adds, "Patient wristband reads Schaffer. That was Grote's assumed name."

A particularly hard step in one of the heels. Closer to Karen, now. "Goddamnit! I thought you had all the entrances and exits covered. I thought you understood how important this was. But not only did he get in here, he found his target and got out. And who's the woman? Why is she just standing there?"

"She'd be Karen Page, with Nelson & Murdock. Looks like Grote had them on retainer. She's unresponsive. EMT's are on their way," says the second man. The reasonable one.

Karen thinks: DA. Reyes. They knew Grotto's assumed name. They were supposed to have everything covered. And now Grotto is dead.

* * *

_Her parents sign her out of the hospital. She has to sign a form saying she's checking out against medical advice, because they think she's a sentinel and they think she nearly got hypothermia in a zone out. It's ridiculous, of course._

_Father doesn't speak to her at all on the ride home. Won't even look at her. Mom keeps casting these sad-eyed glances over her shoulder, toward the back seat. And Karen can hear the rumble of the engine and the slide-crunch of tires on top of salted pavement and the screechy schwick-pause-schwick of the windshield wipers going back and forth._

_Once they're back at the house, there's a lot of yelling. Most of it from Father. How could she shoot a man. How could she hide her senses from her family. Sentinels are meant to protect people, after all. How could she have let Kevin —_

_But she isn't a sentinel, she's not. A sentinel could have saved Kevin. A sentinel would have been able to tell if Harvey Greene wanted to hurt them. A sentinel wouldn't have emptied a magazine into a man who might have been trying to help her, or might have been coming to kill her._

_They're still all yelling while she packs the things she truly, honestly needs into a bag. The screaming stops when she closes the front door behind her._

* * *

The EMT's end up transporting her to another hospital. They stick her in a private room with a white-noise generator and a ton of air circulators and filters. It's low-light, too, and the walls are painted some soothing blue-green. Karen closes her eyes to avoid the sentinel-safe walls and just focuses on her breathing. In and out. She doesn't listen for the sound of her breath, instead focusing on the feeling of her diaphragm filling and moving as she inhales and exhales.

Foggy's the one to poke his head into her room. He's wearing this sort of anticipatory smile. Or maybe he's just hopeful. Karen tries to offer him a smile in return, but they've got her on the good drugs, so she's not sure how it comes out.

"So, the good news is, they're saying you can go, and you've even got kind of a little swag bag," he tells her as he sits down in the comfy armchair next to her bed. It's supposed to be noiseless, no springs and no creaking fabric, she's pretty sure, but she can still hear the movement, fabric all rubbing together, the seat compressing under him. His tie slides around on his shirt because of the angle.

"The bad news is, our client is definitely dead." He swallows. "And, uh. If you want to take a couple of days off, I don't blame you. There's a list of therapists Metro-General is contracting to talk to people about it, and I'd totally take advantage of that, if I were you. You're probably at the head of the line, since — I mean. You know."

He's trying not to say 'Since you were standing three steps down from somebody who was shot to death.' It's a sweet gesture, and that's Foggy all over. Sharp self-interest and incongruous sweetness, somehow blended together by sarcasm and an utter inability to be intimidated by anything. She wishes she could be that kind of brave, instead of the kind of brave that shoots people when it gets pushed too far.

She wants to ask where Matt is. But it's pointless; wherever he is, Matt's not here. All it would do is cause Foggy pain, and he doesn't deserve that.

"You can't spare me," she says instead.

Air moves. Karen opens her eyes to see Foggy wincing at her. "We can't really pay you, either."

That brings all the other worries back to the fore. It would suck more if she didn't like those worries better than she likes the ones about Grotto and the ones about kind of being a sentinel.

"How are you paying rent? I mean. If it's okay to ask. You don't have to answer that."

"My parents are helping. Mom's been really, really smug about how if I'd been a butcher…" He trails off. "What about you? I mean, I know Matt has a rainy day thing from his dad — long story — but you… Nelson and Murdock are all you have in New York."

She thinks back to the laptop she keeps at the foot of a bed with an iron-railing headboard, deliberately timeless. "I have a night job." Off Foggy's horrified look, she says, "It's no big deal. A couple hours a week. Online piecework stuff I can do from home."

He sighs. "We're going to make this work, Karen. Even if we have to become a legal aid agency."

She debates her options. But if Matt's not here — and some part of her she doesn't like very much wonders where he is, why he's always gone when they get hurt — then she ought to tell Foggy. He's so good at finding the loopholes, the angles.

"Foggy, I overheard some stuff during my — my episode." She can't call it a zone out. She might be a sentinel, but that's just too much. "Something about the DA? Reyes? And this really, really angry woman was saying that the cops were supposed to have all the entrances and exits covered. And Foggy, they knew the alias I used for Grotto. I think… I think this might have been a trap."

He listens to her. He does her at least the courtesy of taking it seriously. She can see him trying to put pieces together in his head, and then he says, "You know I've got a guy in the precinct, right? I'll talk to him. See if he knows anything. But Karen, we may never know more than this. Even if our client got caught in the crossfire —"

"Even if our client was used as bait? For a shooter. Without his or our knowledge? Isn't that illegal somehow?"

"Karen, if I thought we stood a chance, I'd have a hell of a lot of fun suing the DA. I'm just not sure we do. Let me talk to my guy, okay?"

* * *

_She does what she can to make ends meet. Does what she has to. She learns to do it from a distance, though. The one time she got close, down on her knees, the scent hit her, so thick and sharp she could taste it in the roof of her mouth. She _froze_. Just knelt there, the breezes carrying the scents of the city — the scents of the man in front of her — toward her, until nothing else mattered. _

_He used her mouth anyway, and walked away without paying._

_It's a mistake she doesn't make more than once._

* * *

The swag bag is actually her clothes — since the hospital had put her in a soft linen smock during her episode — and her discharge papers and a little booklet with the eye-in-the-palm logo of the National Office of Sentinel Safety & Health on the cover. The title reads, "Newly Emergent Sentinel Resource Guide." Her discharge instructions read, "Consult guide for coping resources; avoid strong stimuli for 48 hours; IN STIMULUS EMERGENCY take 100 mg diphenhydramine and do not drive or operate heavy machinery."

Foggy drives her home. It's a whole experience, complete with Foggy only half-looking over his shoulder at least once and snarling at like three cabbies.

"I learned to drive in a van," he says like that explains everything as he parks her smoothly in her space in the garage. She kisses him on the cheek and lets him wait with her in her apartment until his Lyft shows up. She pulls out a bottle of some green tea concoction, which he nods approvingly of with obvious reluctance; they don't really get together to make healthy choices. The tea tastes thin and sharp, but it's cool going down her throat, and the scent of it is so faint that it's comforting.

After Foggy leaves, she reads the booklet.

The next morning, Foggy has sent her a text reading only, 'In talk to become legal aid :( Matt sick too :( :( take the day :)' and then a string of barely comprehensible emojis she thinks are related to medicine, or maybe health. She doesn't bother with makeup or her usual office clothes. It's a yoga-pants-and-comfy-cami day. The NOSSAH isn't going to care. Hell, they'll probably approve.

The National Office Of Sentinel Safety & Health Regional Resource Center isn't too far from Hell's Kitchen, but then again, this is Manhattan. Not counting traffic, nothing is really as far from anything else as she'd been used to in Vermont. She calls a cab, and it probably says something about how wrung out she is from her episode that she sits listlessly in the back, drinking bottled green tea, rather than fully upright in her seat, watching the other cars go by and paying actual attention to the way the cabbie drives on the off chance there's something she can do about it. The Office itself turns out to be the first three floors in yet another goddamn highrise, which surprises her.

What doesn't surprise her is the white noise generators, the complete and total lack of scent except for a faint lemon-and-mint cleaner smell, the dim, unobtrusive lighting, or the soothing mint-gray walls. The carpet is thick and noiseless, and there's a crazy moment she's tempted to kneel just enough to put her fingers in it and see if it's as un-scratchy as she expects it to be.

The receptionist speaks in a voice he has to have practiced. It's pleasant sounding, but perfectly modulated in both pitch and volume. He doesn't speak too loudly or softly, not a single syllable has a note exceptionally high or low, and he takes special care not to lean too hard on any of his consonants, especially his sibilants. He's even a perfect balance between nightmarishly cheerful and totally rote, sounding both engaged and professional.

Karen is pretty sure this man is a robot.

"Good afternoon! Welcome to the National Office of Sentinel Safety and Health Regional Resource Center. My name is Steven. What can the Office do for you today? Oh, and if you can please go ahead and sign in — it doesn't have to be your real name, although we do prefer it — we'd really appreciate it."

She scrawls 'Karen P' on the sign-in notebook, and then looks around. The only other people in the lobby are a young woman keeping half an eye on a gangly pre-teen.

She leans in anyway. Quiets her voice. It's not a sentence she ever thought she'd say aloud. She's been managing it.

"I, um. I think I might be a sentinel. I don't — I'm not sure what comes next."

To his credit, the receptionist only nods. He sort of sweeps his hand toward a square of chairs, somehow seeming extra polite rather than dismissive.

"I'll let the caseworkers know. Someone should be with you soon."

She doesn't sit in the noiseless, un-scratchy chair for long. The woman who comes to get her has pale green eyes and twisted braids dyed a bright, unnatural copper. She introduces herself — no handshake — as Maureen.

She's wearing ballet flats rather than heels. It's a nice touch.

Maureen takes her to a room on the second floor. The white noise generators here are a little slower, less efficient. But the focus of the room is a touchscreen computer monitor at a desk.

Maureen logs her in, taking down her information from her driver license, and the next thing she knows, Karen is sitting in a carefully designed chair at an ergonomic desk, tapping out answers to insipid questions. There are a lot of 'rate one to five' questions, and then she selects, 'no enhanced touch sensitivity,' 'no enhanced taste sensitivity,' and, 'no enhanced visual acuity.'

She eventually slips on a pair of headphones and spends about three minutes identifying progressively quieter tones. Next, the system tests her enhanced sense of smell with a few clicks, whirs, and the hisses of released steam.

The computer records her as a two-sense sentinel.

And Maureen goes down a checklist with her. The resources available to sentinels if they need guides. The jobs they're considered best qualified for. What they should do if they see or overhear something classified, or private, or illegal.

She listens, only half believing. Sure, she tested. But it had been hard to believe that there was anything really unusual about her senses. And it's still hard to believe that out of every five people who sit down at that computer, four walk away without a certification. It had seemed so easy. She hadn't even had to listen hard.

How can her two enhanced senses mean that she could qualify for a Private Investigator license after an online exam?

How is Karen Page, some nobody from Vermont that everybody's better off ignoring, actually the one sitting in a carefully designed chair listening to a woman talk to her about how the services of a guide can be covered at half cost under commercial insurance policies, but are only covered under Medicare and Medicaid if her enhanced senses are disabling?

This can't be her life.

Numbly, she signs the printed test results. Rolls her thumb over the biometric scanner, digitizing her fingerprint. She's in the registry now.

* * *

_The real bitch of it is: she would never have read the goddamn attachment if McClintock hadn't said she wouldn't._

_Karen is just barely starting to realize that she can hear things other people couldn't, and they're useful. For example, her boss grumbling that he would kill for a cup of coffee, or wondering where something is, in his closed office. Or the sloshy sounds of the coffee pot getting too empty in the little room around the corner._

_And yeah, the email comes out of the blue on a Tuesday morning, and she forwards it immediately to Ian McClintock. But then she hears him in his office, the fast, high-pitched creak as he sits forward in his chair. And then his voice, annoyed and a little breathless, "What? No! We don't need to do anything about the secretary. She's got my office running great, but she's not ambitious. She wouldn't open it in a million years."_

_Not only does Karen open it, she copies it, and then forwards the copy to what the New York Bulletin's website lists as its crime & investigation editor, Mitchell Ellison._

_From her work computer, as an added fuck you. Not a subtle one, in hindsight._

* * *

Foggy never gets back to her about what 'his guy' said. He's too busy with government grant paperwork, which Karen takes a look at and immediately backs away from. It's significantly more complicated than applying for FAFSA, and the last time she tried that had been ten years ago.

"Well," Foggy says, bitterly — more bitter than she's heard him since the worst of the Fisk case; she kind of wonders if Matt's mysterious vanishing act has something to do with it. "At least we won't have a problem proving we can operate as a not-for-profit. I'll just send them copies of our bank statements."

"Make sure you don't mention the strawberry rhubarb pie; I'm pretty sure they'll count it as income," she says. She smiles at him, to soften it a little, and then pulls her purse out of the bottom drawer of her desk. "I forgot to mention that I have an appointment soon. Is it okay if I take a long lunch?"

To her surprise, Foggy's expression turns delighted. He grins at her and wipes an imaginary tear from his cheek. "Why, Karen, are you actually going to go talk to NOSSAH about what our office can do to be more AESA compliant?"

She has zero intention of that, actually. Ever. She's managed just fine in the office for the last year. Outside of special situations like gunshots, she doesn't need any sort of accommodations.

"I don't think I'm supposed to tell you what I talk to NOSSAH about," she says instead, and Foggy winks.

"Go," he says. "I'll see if Matt's over his bug."

She doesn't go to NOSSAH, of course. Instead, she gathers up the articles she'd been printing and heads to the District Attorney's office. There's a bored receptionist on the bottom floor who waves Karen on. A security guard flicks his eyes over her, but she's not concealing any weapons and her bag passed through the metal detector just fine. He loses interest.

ADA Tower actually rates one of the nicer offices on his floor. His desk is as covered in paperwork as her own, or Foggy's. She raps on his doorframe a few times before she steps in, and notes that the spines on the books in his bookshelf are all cracked. They look well-used, in fact, and there are a couple of spots where one book leans against another, bridging a gap, and what she suspects are the missing ones are piled on his desk.

"Miss Karen Page," Tower says, looking up from a sheaf of papers at least forty pages thick. "What brings you to the office of the district attorney?"

She starts tossing print outs on the desk. Naming the cases, the coverage, the rulings. The resultant firings — and how Reyes had stayed precisely where she wanted, even as she gleefully tossed interns, paralegals, and assistant district attorneys out of the office to make up for her mistakes. She never says that Tower could easily be next for the absolute shitshow that was the hospital, but the implication is there.

And she can see how furious it makes him. Can hear it, in the way his heartbeat speeds up. Can smell that sharp-edged anger scent rising up from his skin.

"Are you trying to persuade me to turn on Reyes?"

"No," she says. She means yes. "Of course not. I just — I think there's more to what happened at the hospital. And I think it might be helpful — to you, to her, to us — if I had the context. The press would be very interested to hear that the hospital shooter is actually a known assailant that the District Attorney was trying to trap."

His pulse grows almost thunderously loud, but his expression remains almost totally neutral. Only the arch of his eyebrows gives any hint of what he's feeling. His voice turns rough, rage mixed with incredulity. "Are you blackmailing this office?"

Karen shakes her head. "I'm giving you a chance to explain, if there's a reason I shouldn't go to them with the names Reyes and Morris. Um. Unless there's a reason I should?" That last is said in a perfectly innocent tone, and she knows it hit home, even though Tower doesn't blink.

He half rises, gathering up her printouts and an extra folder. Tower's good, she has to give him that; she almost doesn't see the way he spreads a couple others on his desk. He tucks the print outs he'd gathered up and the extra folder into a manila envelope and tosses it toward her.

"I don't have to listen to vague, unsubstantiated threats from a secretary. Now, I'm going to go let security know you're not welcome here anymore. I expect you gone by the time I get back, and you will make no further attempts to contact me or anyone in this office. Have I made myself clear?"

Karen catches the envelope. "Perfectly," she says, because he has.

As soon as his footsteps have faded toward the end of the hall, she gathers up the other files as well and heads out of the building. Tower must take the elevator; she takes the stairs down, and the echoes of her footsteps are reassuring.

* * *

_Union Allied comes down on her head like the proverbial sack of bricks. Possibly bricks made out of shit. Possibly the sack is on fire._

_She's pretty sure Daniel Fisher standing at the entrance to her apartment building with a sheaf of papers in hand will be the crowner of a day filled with disasters. McClintock had committed suicide, she'd been left with the impression that while she'd done well in both her interviews, she wouldn't get an offer on either, and now here is Daniel, obviously ready to serve her with notice she's being sued._

_He stands by the doorway, and when he sees her, he smiles._

_"Karen Page?" He asks, and at her nod, he says, "I should be serving you notice, but, uh. I'd rather buy you a drink." His heartbeat is steady, and he drops the sheaf of papers in a trash can outside her apartment building._

_The drinks smell normal. Fisher's a little handsy for a married guy, but she figures his marriage is his problem. And then the world turns to a smear of color, and then the world doesn't exist at all, only this endless ringing silence, followed by darkness._

_She wakes on her knees in her apartment with a bloody knife in her hand, and the sound of booted footsteps outside her door._

* * *

The man who'd shot up a hospital has a name. She learns it. Uses it. There are hospital records in the files Tower slipped her, and she follows the trail they lead. She does at least text Foggy that she's out following up on a few things. He sends her a thumbs up emoji, and she goes to talk to the nurse who'd been responsible for most of Frank Castle's care. Guilt free, even.

The address he gives her takes her to Queens. It's a nice neighborhood, houses and lawns well-tended. Even Frank Castle's lawn still looks manicured, she realizes. Is somebody still paying for upkeep? Has Castle himself still been living here?

She recognizes her mistake the minute she's slipped the lock on the kitchen door. She's only barely stepped into the house before she smells it: stale air and dust. A plastic garbage bag with contents so over-ripe it's practically fermented. The house is perfectly still, too, nothing moving. No drift of air currents from a fan left running or an air conditioner at work. Only a faint, persistent electronic buzz from somewhere high up.

There are toys all over the place, and they surprise her. Dinosaur figures on every surface that can support them. Green plastic soldiers on the piano bench. Little Price figurines. Hot Wheels cars. Dead, dried-out bouquets on the console table in the front hall. Mail stacked up by the door, jamming the slot. At the top of the pile are bills, but just beneath those are magazines, hand-written cards. There's a woman's looping handwriting on a sheet of paper in the kitchen, making a grocery list.

Apparently, the Castle family had needed butter, mascarpone, white wine, lemons, muffin mix, and Amber Bock. They'd been subscribed to Nat Geo, a local grocery store's weekly coupon paper, and some kids' discovery thing that seems mostly to be about endangered species with the occasional dinosaur.

It's such a normal house.

She closes her eyes and takes a few deep breaths in. Past the stale air, past the dust, beneath the crumbling flowers, she catches traces of human scents. Just the soap-and-skin scents she's used to, and, beneath those, the bare edges of what the NOSSAH literature calls "chemosignals." It's not really possible to identify them from a distance; she lets them fill her nose, and then catalogues how they make her feel.

Excitement. Contentment. Exasperation. Something warm and fuzzy that wraps around her and she refuses to name.

Upstairs, the people smells are stronger. She finds a girl's bedroom with the name 'Lisa' on its walls in big block letters. Sports trophies — soccer, it looks like — and art. A little boy's room. Some sort of informational wall hanging, with an inky, tiny footprint and the words, "When you were born, you were _7 lbs 9 ozs_ " and "We decided to call you _Frank Jr_ because," although the reason isn't filled out.

She wonders what deep reason parents ever have for naming their children for themselves.

Kevin's middle name had been Paxton.

But thinking of him hurts. She heads back downstairs to take in the sitting room, with all its photographs. One of them, she pulls off the shelf and tucks into her purse. She shouldn't, and yet she can't imagine leaving the building without it. She only half-remembers the face of the man who'd pursued her and Grotto through the hospital, but here she sees him all over again. Leaning casually against part of the carousel with a blonde woman and two children. All smiling.

She saves the master room for last, and finds herself wondering how anyone who had slept in this room could have walked down a hospital hallway firing a shotgun. It's more than comfortable — it's almost welcoming. Thick white rugs on the hardwood floor. A heavy wooden vanity with a big mirror and a scattering of make-up and hairbrushes on its surface. A big king-sized bed with fluffy-looking pillows and a duvet cover that's soft under her fingertips.

There's a strong smell of old perfume here. Old cologne, too. She picks up notes of lemongrass and bergamot and cedar, and a skin-scent that makes her stop moving. She opens her mouth, wetting the air with the tip of her tongue.

Him. It's him. But here he had been happy, and she doesn't need the chemosignals to know that. She can tell simply by what's not there: the scents of stress, or anger, or pain. She's sure the Castle household was far from perfect, but by the smell of it, Frank Castle and his wife — whoever she was — rarely slept on their anger.

She's so lost in it, in the scents of this room, that she doesn't hear the footsteps on the front walk. Doesn't have any idea that anybody's coming until she hears the front door open.

It startles her enough that she jerks, but even as she's turning to find an exit route or a place to hide, she's recognizing the heartbeat of the person who comes storming into the house.

It's really, really awkward when he comes up the stairs as she's coming down them.

"You," he says, and it's funny, how almost all of Castle's face is a hard, angry mask, but his eyes manage to look soft and wounded. "Shithead squad's ETA is maybe three minutes. You don't wanna get arrested, come with me." A pause, as those hurt eyes narrow, considering. "Maybe you should get arrested. Either way, get the fuck out."

"I had to know who you were," she blurts, because that is a totally sensible thing to say in this situation. "I just — the hospital was a trap. I had to know why."

He stares at her like she's crazy. Then he looks around the house, like he's seeing it for the first time.

"Three minutes," she reminds him, and she could leave without him, could breeze right on by this man who looks like he's taken a hit to the gut, but she can't quite make herself.

He turns on his heel and heads back down the stairs. He moves straight for the kitchen, and she follows him, and since she took a cab getting here, she follows him all the way to his car — a beaten, rusty-bottomed panel van. Some part of her starts screaming at her that it's a serial killer van, that he's going to take her apart to her component pieces and leave bits of her all over the lawn as a fuck-you to the universe at large.

The part of her that is, for now, actually _running_ her body climbs gamely in after him.

It surprises him, she realizes. He stares at her, startled, like he'd already half-forgotten her existence. There's a moment where he doesn't say anything, and she's too busy taking in the van to say anaything, either. She smells dog. Smells human stress, and pain, and anger. All the anger Frank Castle and his wife had never slept on seems to be in this van, sticking to everything in a nauseating film, like cigarette smoke. The homey, comfortable skin-scent has become something she almost doesn't recognize.

The dog whines, and she looks for it. There's a gray pitbull lying a little awkwardly on a folded up blanket. Karen assumes the position is because of the cone. The bandage on the dog's ankle probably didn't help matters. The dog whines again, shifting restlessly, and Castle's gaze flicks to it before he jerks his head toward the van's front.

Karen can't help but notice all the guns as she moves through the cramped space and settles herself into a passenger seat that Castle carelessly clears for her, knocking little sealed rectangles (and burrito wrappers, and sandwich wrappers) off and into the floor. He starts the engine, and the rumble after it turns over vibrates through her eardrums down to her bones. She can feel it creep forward even as she hears his foot leave the brake pedal, a rush of air and an almost relieved release of pressure on the brake line.

"Why were you in my house?" He asks as he maneuvers the van out onto the darkened streets. Strangely, she can pick his voice out even over the engine's rattle, which drowns out any noise the pitbull might be making.

"I told you before. I had to know who you were. I know that there's something Reyes isn't saying — she's the one who leaked Grotto to you. She had — she had a SWAT team there. Waiting for you. I want to know why you're so important she put on some kind of covert operation in a hospital, why she used our client as bait, just for a chance to shoot at you."

It all comes tumbling out of her in a rush. This is the first time she's had to put her motivations into words. The past few days have been a blur of handling the hospital aftermath and then just — this wordless, nameless urge to find out what happened and why. There had been a mystery, and she couldn't have walked away if she'd tried.

Curiosity is very probably going to be her cause of death. Quite possibly in the next few minutes.

But he just looks at her. And then he shakes his head. "I don't know. I know she hates me. Never figured out why."

"Okay," she says. "Okay. What I have on you — it's, um, it's police complaint number —" She blanks for a moment, then shakes her head. "Doesn't matter. You didn't file it." His stare is blank. Uncomprehending. "It says you were stopped at a traffic light, and somebody fired into your car with a nine millimeter. Juvenile male, juvenile female — those were Frank Jr. and Lisa? — and an adult woman were found dead at the scene. Adult male driver was — you were — critically wounded and taken to Metro-General."

He seems to understand now. His heartbeat speeds up, and as his core warms all over again, she smells sweat and his warm skin. Even his breath is coming a little faster. "Bullshit," he says, and the rich textures of that voice have turned harsh and grating, like he's been dragged over ground glass by the vocal cords. "It wasn't — we weren't at a — shit, I wasn't _driving_."

He says that last with such disgust that Karen startles a little. She hadn't thought that was what had happened. But to realize that the police complaint was a total lie? It feels like Fisk again. Like that horrible boxed feeling, where all her choices had already been made for her, and she alone was struggling to get free.

"Then what did happen?"

He closes his eyes. "It goes in and out," he says. "Maria was — she was drivin'. Mornin' after I got back, you know, and I ain't driven anything in city traffic in, shit, eighteen months? I wasn't gonna take that chance. Not with the kids in the back."

"But it did happen in your car? When you were stopped at a red light?" Even as she asks, she knows the answer is no. It's too simple — and why bother saying he was driving, if he'd been in the passenger seat? Why tell that lie, unless whoever had written the report had simply assumed that Frank would have been the driver?

"No," Castle says, and tells her the truth.

* * *

_Maybe it was Wesley's influence — assuming he had as much as she thinks — or maybe that's just how Fisk is, but looking back, so much of it was feints. Movements orchestrated to engender a response, to put people places. To create opportunities._

_Like, for example, her time in prison._

_She hears the guard coming before she sees him. His heartbeat is too fast, too panicky, and he stinks of sweat._

_She's heard rumors that everyone's blood has its own unique smell — but she's never noticed that. It's always just iron and copper and salt. But she's so grateful to smell it, as she twists and struggles and finally jabs her hand up and back, fingernails catching on something soft and wet._

* * *

He doesn't take her home. She doesn't even _ask_ to go home. Instead they end up at an all night diner, with cups of coffee in front of both of them — Castle leaves his black — and menus on the table, not that either of them glances in their direction yet. He leans back against the booth, one arm lifted up and stretched along the booth's back, and his gaze seems to have no particular focus. He's taking in the whole room as well as her with an almost predatory expression of ease. Outside of the cramped panel van, he seems to take up more space, seems to suck the air out of the room.

"You actually saw the house," he says, eventually, while she's still stirring sugar into her coffee. "Yeah? You saw it. Shit, you more than saw it?"

"I'm a sentinel," she admits. It's the first time she's said those words out loud, like they're true. Like they're nothing more than true. "Just two senses."

She sees the moment the understanding hits him. Sees it in his expression, as he says, "Hearing. One of 'em's hearing. What's the other?"

She shakes her head. "Not here." His face turns disbelieving, eyebrows arching as he leans in toward her a little, and she says, defensive, "I don't talk about it."

He sips his coffee while lasering his eyes in on her. His focus is intense — the same kind of scrutiny Matt can give the impression of — and she looks back at him evenly. After a few moments he tips his head, like he's admitting she's got a good reason not to talk about it, or at least like he can see enough of the way it bothers her to stop pushing.

Eventually, he leans back in his booth again and says, "You wanted the truth, yeah? Now you know. So what are you gonna do with it?" His mouth quirks into a wry, death's head sort of smile. The kind with no humor, or humor as bitter as military coffee. "You gonna sue Reyes?"

"Reyes has it out for you — and someone in her office was the one who told me who you are. She's been gathering information on you since the shooting. I'm gonna find the rest. Whatever I have to do."

The scrutiny doesn't let up. "And what are you gonna do once you know, huh?"

She doesn't know. She can't see that far ahead. It all depends on what's really beneath all this, on what Reyes and Tower have been hiding. But she's not willing to say that to him. Not this man, who has scores and stacks of bodies stretching out behind him, leading a trail through something darker than she can name yet. Frank Castle is a man with a plan -- she's not about to admit she's operating without one.

"Whatever I can," she says, and sips her coffee. It's awful. She has a feeling she's going to be drinking a lot of it, in the coming days. "Whatever I have the ammunition for."

That draws another wry smile out of him.

* * *

_Most apartments — most buildings, really — smell like cleaning supplies. Bleach. Ammonia. They're the two most basic ingredients, and even if they're rarely knowingly mixed, almost every room smells like a mix of the two. Porcelain surfaces usually smell bleachy to her, while the air around a window usually smells of warmed-up ammonia, which mostly reminds her of cat piss. The sheer massive amount of things that smell like one kind of piss or other, or like hot garbage, is a truth that sentinels don't share._

_She certainly doesn't. Then again, she's not a sentinel._

_Matt's apartment smells like hers does, like fresh-squeezed lemon and a blend of vinegars, mostly white. Not a touch of Lysol or Pinesol or Scrubbing Bubbles. There are pots of basil and rosemary on one of the windowsills, and they make an apartment that already smells good to her smell even fresher. It's a trick she'll have to try when the police clear her place out and let her go back. If that ever even happens._

_She can hear his heartbeat as she changes clothes without turning away from him. His head never dips, and his heartbeat stays steady. She wonders, wildly, what her own must sound like._

_She lies, and his heart speeds up, too._

_Later, Karen will wonder why she never wondered._

* * *

Castle is less concerned with getting answers than revenge, but they manage to scrounge up a plan. As hard as it may be for him to look back, he comes alive thinking about the immediate future. When it comes to tactics, to predicting people, he can be a genius.

Their plan is simple: Karen will reach out to what contacts she has. She'll get whatever cover story will hold. And in the meantime, they'll let the world think she's his hostage. It might make Reyes more reluctant to shoot at him, if there's a known, semi-famous civilian in the way.

He doesn't take her back to her apartment. Instead, they pile back into his van, and it rattles toward an even seedier side of Hell's Kitchen than she had ever imagined. It reeks even worse than the van does, but the deathtrap safehouse he leads her into — one hand closed around her upper arm, tight, hard enough to hurt; Castle has evidently decided that pretend hostages still need real bruises — smells like bleach and cosmoline. They're strong, stinging her nose, but she's so used to both of them that they don't bother her too badly.

The safe house is a cot, a few tins of beans that haven't been cleared away, and rows and rows and rows of weapons and home-made grenades. On the far wall, she sees a map with pins and strings. It reminds her of Ben and his corkboard, and she misses him with a sudden fierce ache that she tries to ignore. This is exactly what Ben would do, she's pretty sure, and the thought leads to another person she can call on, a cover story that might actually work.

"I'll need to go to the Bulletin," she says.

Castle has moved past her and is twisting knobs on a massive piece of... She thinks it's radio equipment. It sounds like the police band, from when she used to listen to it back in Boston. Unlike her, he doesn't seem to have any need of a list of codes, or at least she doesn't see one out anywhere near the radio.

"Reporters?" He tilts his head without looking back her way. "You're gonna bring —"

"We need the truth out," she snaps. "Whatever else we do. People need to know the truth. Not whatever story Reyes is selling — and we don't even know what her story is, really, just a piece of it. Talking to the Bulletin? That's how we find out, and that's how we move all of this, this shit she's hiding into the light."

He's not happy. She can see that, in the line of his shoulders. Can hear it, in the harsh rumble of his breath through his chest. But he eventually tips his head again, like he's acknowledging that she's right. "Okay," he says. And then he asks: "You ever held a gun?"

Because of course he does.

Karen hesitates for a moment. But she made her decision when she followed him into his van, and she tells him, "Yes."

He seems to evaluate her again. It lasts a while, but then he just says, "Good. I'm gonna go get the dog." At first she think's it's a non sequitur, maybe some kind of weird brain hiccup left over from having been shot in the head, but as he passes by her, he smoothly bends down and pulls an XDM Compact from an ankle holster and slaps it into her hand.

And then he's out the door, and she can only assume he's headed toward his van.

Karen drifts toward Castle's bulletin board, tracing lines out from the center — the Carousel — toward faces and names written on scraps of paper. Witnesses, she thinks, although some of them just look like evidence. It's a complicated web, and the scents of dye and Castle's fingers rise up from everything, the string, the board itself, the paper.

She hears him coming before he slams the door back open. Smells the dog before he gets close —

But the pistol is in her hands as she turns, and his face, his heartbeat are not surprised to see his own gun pointed at him. He slows down, though, moving more cautiously. Like he actually thinks she'll shoot. His gaze never leaves her face.

She re-engages the safety and sets the XDM Compact down on his work table. "It would have killed you to let me know it was you, I guess."

"You knew it was me." He says it evenly. He doesn't seem at all annoyed that she turned his own gun on him. Unsurprised, maybe, and when he re-holsters the XDM Compact and moves past her, toward a wall and a crate, she gets the feeling that she's passed some sort of test. What he was testing her for, she's not sure. She's not even sure why he's testing her. But he does seem to approve.

Just what she's always wanted. The approval of a man willing to shoot up a hospital.

Castle opens up the crate door and points inside, the line of his body stiff and commanding. The crate looks too small to her, and cold, and uncomfortable, but as he opens it up she sees a doggie bed her father's pampered gun dogs would have envied, and the pitbull has enough room to turn around a few times before lying down. The cone doesn't even touch any of the walls.

"What's his name?"

"Jiggs," Castle says, short. "Got her off the Irish."

And her thoughts flash back to Grotto trying his hardest not to talk about the hit on the Kitchen Irish. He'd been haunted by the way the scene had been like some kind of train wreck with bullets. Talked about it a lot, actually, and every word had been both like pulling teeth and like he couldn't stop.

The wreckage Frank Castle leaves behind seems vastly at odds with the comfortable crate and the dog bed and the cone. Seems at odds, too, with the fact that she's alive and in his bolt hole. Maybe the house is the context -- a man who used to have a family, a man who loved them so much that losing them can only be expressed with broken glass and military-grade semi-automatics and blood all over the floors and walls.

Maybe she's got an early start on Stockholm.

Once he has Jiggs secured in her crate, he tosses a black flip phone at her. She only fumbles a little as she catches it.

"You know how to reach him?"

She digs her own phone — one of the cheaper StarkTech models — out of her purse, and Frank's eyes light on it. His heartbeat speeds up, and then he's moving toward her, reaching out for it.

"Shoulda known you'd be carrying one of those," and the growl in his voice rumbles all the way down into his chest. "Shit, I shoulda thought about it. They can —"

"If Reyes looks, she'll know where it's been," she realizes. And Reyes will look, if they think that Karen's his hostage. Shit. "We can't stay here."

"Make your call," he says, and his voice is harsh. She starts the search for contact information for Mitchell Ellison, Ben's boss. He's not hard to find. She enters the number on the flip phone, rather than her own.

And while she's working her way through the network, trying to think of what she's going to say, Castle starts carrying boxes and crates out the door. He ignores his wall of evidence almost entirely.

She gets through to Ellison before she's totally ready. She shouldn't have expected anything less.

His voice is clipped as he answers with just his last name.

"Um. Hello?" She hears herself ask, and Castle actually looks over at her, his eyebrows arching. "I don't know if you remember me. From, um, Ben's funeral. I'm Karen —"

"I remember you. Karen Page," he says, and he sounds only a little less clipped. More wary, though, now.

"I'm sorry about that. Yelling at you. I shouldn't have —"

"Ben always was a pain in my ass," Ellison says, but he doesn't sound at all like he resents it. Like he's angry about it. "Makes sense his friends would be, too. What can I do for you, Karen?"

"I. I found something. Reyes — District Attorney Reyes — is hiding something. Covering something up. The shoot-out at the hospital — did you hear about it? It wasn't just some psycho with a shotgun. It was ESU setting a trap. With her cooperation. I have proof."

Ellison waits a beat before replying, and then says, flatly, "Proof."

"I — I was there. I saw Reyes herself. But I'm — I'm kind of — embedded, I guess? With the person that the ESU was setting a trap for."

"And what makes you any better a witness than the guy who said aliens did it?" There's skepticism in Ellison's voice, but it's not harsh. "A conspiracy involving the District Attorney is a hard sell. I'm gonna need airtight corroboration." A pause, and then Ellison asks, sharp, "Embedded?"

She takes a deep breath in and lets it out, remembering Ben, the way Ben talked, the way he thought. She wonders if he'd been a closeted sentinel -- just like her, for most of her adult life. But thinking about how Ben thought gives her a little bit more of a plan.

"From the top," she says. "I'm a sentinel. Licensed. I was with Grotto — Elliott Grote — when he was shot. I was standing right next to him, when — when this guy the DA code named 'the Punisher' shot him. I had a zone out, that's documented, and when I was zoned out, I heard the ESU team and the DA talking about a trap going wrong. I tracked down more information about him, and now I'm..."

She's not going to tell Ellison she's a hostage. It's not true, and somebody needs to know the truth. She's going to need to have someone who can go on the record and refute everything, all of Reyes' lies.

"I'm kind of stuck with him."

Ellison's voice is quiet and strained, and he speaks very slowly. "Miss Page, are you being held hostage?"

"No!"

"You're there of your own free will."

"Yes."

"But you're… stuck?"

"I can't leave," she says, and it's a shitty explanation. This is all such a shitty explanation. But it's not like she has better. "Reyes is going to shoot first, never ask questions, and then bury — bury whatever it is that she's trying to hide with him, with Frank Castle, as some psycho shooter. She's gonna spin some, some 'shell-shocked veteran who cracked' story and none of it's gonna be true, and we're gonna be too dead to argue!"

There's a long, long pause as Ellison puts it all together. But then he offers her a heavy sigh. The kind of profound, world-weary sigh that comes from shepherding reckless daredevil reporters for twenty years. It's so deep that she can hear it rising up and rumbling from the bottom of his chest, even across a phone line with a heavy tone in the background.

"Do you have an anonymous email address? Get one. Minimum five hundred words copy sent to the Bulletin -- my email -- every week. Start with the hospital shooting. Don't include anything that could identify you in the first draft. _Do not use adjectives_."

She lets out a breath — a very small sigh of relief — and, totally coincidentally, Castle seems to have loaded everything he's interested in taking. He holds his hand out for the burner, and she says, soft and rushed, "Okay. Okay. I'll do it. I have to go, I —"

And she hands Castle the burner. He snaps it closed, and holds his other hand out. When she places her smartphone in his palm, he turns his hand over and drops it on the bare concrete floor. After that, it's just transporting the dog and the crate downstairs, to the back of the van. As she peeks inside, she sees that it's so crowded with weapons that there's barely enough room for the dog crate. Jiggs makes an odd, breathy whining noise as she loads up, but she circles around a few times on her dog bed and then settles in, looking forlornly up at the humans who have put her back in the van.

Karen climbs into the passenger seat, and the sound as the door slams closed rings in her ears for a few extra moments, sounding strangely final, and yet can't compete with the noise of Castle's movements.

Day one as a hostage.


End file.
